Closer Look: Gigabyte Maya II R9200

We are very grateful to Gigabyte Technology, which is more known for its mainboards, for the opportunity to test their graphics adapter. Today we are going to pay special attention to their value graphics card with an exotic name: Maya II R9200. This product comes to retail stores in a dark-colored paper box:

The box contained the following items:

• Gigabyte Maya II R9200 graphics card;
• DVI-I-to-D-Sub adapter;
• S-Video-to-RCA adapter;
• S-Video cable;
• RCA cable;
• CD with the PowerDVD utility;
• CD with Serious Sam: The Second Encounter game.

As we’ve got a pre-sale version of the product, there was no original user manual and CD with drivers. The manufacturer was so kind to offer us a CD-R disk with them.

Serious Sam is a rather old game, but the engine from Croteam looks quite pretty. This game has beautiful graphics, but doesn’t put too much demand onto the hardware and works smoothly even on value graphics cards.

When you take the card, you will right away pay attention to extremely simple and compact PCB, which has no excessive details. The silver-colored pin heatsink stands out against the traditional Gigabyte’s dark-blue background. Yes, the card has no active cooling system. This heatsink should be quite enough here, if you are not into extreme overclocking. The card carries eight memory chips, Hynix HY5DV281622AT-5 with 5ns access time. Total memory amount is 128MB. The memory works at 200MHz (400MHz DDR) and you can hardly overclock it. Anyway, we will discuss overclocking issues later on.

The core works at 250MHz. As we will soon find out, graphics chip overclocking is also impossible. But even at its regular frequency, the graphics chip heatsink heated up a lot as well as memory chips.

As you see, the PCB lacks some elements. For example, capacitors are not installed in the upper right corner. To the right of the chip there is empty space for Rage Theater chip, probably left for a VIVO version of the product. The 4-pin connector below the D-Sub one is not present, too. We usually see such connectors in audio cards: they serve for inputting analog signal from a CD-ROM drive or TV-tuner. The Rage Theater chip itself is not so important for RADEON 9000/9200 as RV250/280 chips are two-headed (i.e. support dual-display configurations) and can output TV-signal without additional controllers.

At the back side of Maya II R9200 there are only a few voltage regulators.

This card is a pre-sale sample, so its PCB has REV0 2 chip revision, which you can see in the snapshot.